Just when you think you’ve seen it all when it comes to scholarly publishing, a brief in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education online notes a new way some publishers have found to puff-up a journal’s impact. It reports findings from a recently published survey in Science which indicate that some journal editors “… often ask prospective authors to add superfluous citations of the journal to articles, and authors feel they can’t refuse.” Here is a link to the article, which includes a summary of the paper in Science.

The 2012 edition of Beall’s List of Predatory Open Access Publishers is now available at http://metadata.posterous.com/83235355 In addition, there is a watch-list of publishers which show some predatory characteristics.